Results 1 to 21 of 21
  1. #1
    Join Date
    Jan 2014
    Location
    United Kingdom
    Posts
    54

    SSD Storage? Worth the expensive?

    Hello,
    Just thought I would throw out a question to you guys! SSD hosting is more expensive than normal hard drive hosting, resulting in SSD packages offering less space for the same money as normal hard drive hosting. Do people actually prefer to pay extra for SSD? Do you think your customers actually look for SSD hosting? and do you actually see a different in website speed?

    Your experience would be appreciated!
    Ross

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Feb 2012
    Posts
    2,103
    SSD hard drives are more expensive to purchase, hence more expense, they also typically have less storage space than normal HDD (therefore less clients per server, a HDD server might fit double the amount of clients that a SSD server will in terms of storage space, so more costs for the hosts running SSD as they require more servers).

    SSD is definitely worth it if you're running sites based upon MySQL, PHP etc, you'd notice an increase in site performance definitely. If you're running a pure HTML site, the performance difference isn't noticed as much, if at all.
    Clouveo - SSD/NVMe Cloud VPS & Web Hosting
    Cloud VPS Servers | DDoS Protected | Snapshots | Auto Backups | One Click Apps | Custom ISOs
    clouveo.com | Locations: [UK] London, [NL] Amsterdam, [US] Los Angeles

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Jun 2011
    Location
    USA/UK/SG
    Posts
    3,636
    SSD Hosting is getting more and more common in the hosting industry. Providers are starting to offer more disk space for web hosting plans on SSD based storage. A number of budget providers such as CrocWeb use Pure SSD, can't think of anyone else of the top of my head who are the same.
    ~]# Ethernet Servers Ltd - Est. 2014! - sales @ ethernetservers.com
    ~]# Try out our WordPress speed tests for yourself!
    ~]# NVMe Web Hosting | Unmanaged VPS | Fully Managed VPS | Dedicated Servers | Domain Names
    ~]# Don't settle for any less than the very best - come & join our family today!

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Dec 2007
    Location
    LocalHost
    Posts
    1,317
    I find SSD really useful. Its expensive but it worth.
    YagHost - Fast Reliable Hosting Since 2009
    Managed VPS - NVMe DirectAdmin
    Web Hosting - NVMe SSD, AMD EPYC, 10 Gbps (US, Europe, Singapore)

  5. #5
    Join Date
    Jul 2012
    Location
    Charlotte, NC, US
    Posts
    513
    Yes. People do look for SSD hosting as they are more reliable in terms of speed. Most hosting companies uses SSD harddisk on game server for better gaming. Very few use the SSD hard disk for normal web hosting. But If you have a demand you can go for a dedicated server with SSD hosting.
    ⓐ➒AlphaNine
    Shared hosting | cPanel/WHM reseller | KVM VPS | Dedicated Servers | SSL | VoIP | Management |
    99.9% uptime | 24/7 Support | Easy Control Panels | Operating Since 2000 |

  6. #6
    Join Date
    Jan 2014
    Location
    Morrisville, NC
    Posts
    5
    Quote Originally Posted by Criot View Post
    SSD is definitely worth it if you're running sites based upon MySQL
    SSD is worth to pay extra for MyISAM tables.
    Or if you use InnoDB and the buffer pool is much smaller than the database size.

    There are many cases when InnoDB tables small enough to fit into RAM (and a lot of RAM is not rare because it's cheap).
    In that case SSD makes less difference comparing to HDD.

    --
    << signature should be configured in your member profile >>
    Last edited by net; 01-26-2014 at 06:20 PM.

  7. #7
    Join Date
    Mar 2003
    Location
    /root
    Posts
    23,990
    My recommendation is to offer both if you can't provide the same high storage as regular drives.

    Specially 4 U
    Reseller Hosting: Boost Your Websites | Fully Managed KVM VPS: 3.20 - 5.00 Ghz, Pure Dedicated Power
    JoneSolutions.Com is on the net 24/7 providing stable and reliable web hosting solutions, server management and services since 2001
    Debian|Ubuntu|cPanel|DirectAdmin|Enhance|Webuzo|Acronis|Estela|BitNinja|Nginx

  8. #8
    Join Date
    May 2006
    Location
    San Francisco
    Posts
    7,325
    If you care about performance, then SSD is a no-brainer.

  9. #9
    Join Date
    Feb 2006
    Location
    Global
    Posts
    1,642
    Quote Originally Posted by Orien View Post
    If you care about performance, then SSD is a no-brainer.
    I second this, the only reasons you'd stay with HDD are cost and capacity, as other than that it's all benefits.

    Compare SSD with RAM in a web hosting environment and you're blazing.

    Note: await the recommendation of SSD caching from those who can't afford pure SSD.

  10. #10
    Join Date
    Jan 2013
    Location
    UK
    Posts
    258
    Quote Originally Posted by Orien View Post
    If you care about performance, then SSD is a no-brainer.
    Yes true, and like a few of the other ones have said too, its a tad more expensive but it is coming down in price at the moment.

    For performance then SSD all the way, but at the moment standard drives will be around for a long time too!

  11. #11
    Join Date
    Mar 2003
    Location
    /root
    Posts
    23,990
    Quote Originally Posted by iexo View Post
    I second this, the only reasons you'd stay with HDD are cost and capacity, as other than that it's all benefits.
    While I agree with cost and capacity that doesn't mean the performance is no longer there.

    If you are using Raid10 with write cache enabled and enterprise drives, you will still enjoy the speed performance especially if the server is optimized properly and not overloaded.

    Specially 4 U
    Reseller Hosting: Boost Your Websites | Fully Managed KVM VPS: 3.20 - 5.00 Ghz, Pure Dedicated Power
    JoneSolutions.Com is on the net 24/7 providing stable and reliable web hosting solutions, server management and services since 2001
    Debian|Ubuntu|cPanel|DirectAdmin|Enhance|Webuzo|Acronis|Estela|BitNinja|Nginx

  12. #12
    Join Date
    Apr 2009
    Location
    New York City
    Posts
    5,169
    SSD is Avery great feature when it comes to web hosting. Not everyone knows about it and those who do tend to like and use it. I personally think it truly does make a difference with loading times. If you have a decent size data base and lots of php scripts or files then SSD and your site will do well with each other. SSD is also another niche if you look at it. It does improve a lot of things when it comes to housing and SSD but regular hard drives do get the job done.

    I think you'll see a difference someone should put it to a test and let everyone see for themselves.

  13. #13
    Just some numbers:

    Regular 7200rpm HDD makes around 110 random read/write operation per second, while SSD does 50 000 - 100 000, so yes, the difference is HUGE.
    Alnitech.com - dedicated servers for your business
    Dedicated Servers , Disaster Recovery, IaaS, BGP Announcement & More.
    ✓ 24x7 h/w Support & Server Monitoring
    ✓ 21-day Money-back Guarantee

  14. #14
    Join Date
    Dec 2007
    Location
    Indiana, USA
    Posts
    19,196
    Quote Originally Posted by net View Post
    My recommendation is to offer both if you can't provide the same high storage as regular drives.
    SSD Cached storage is a happy medium IMHO.

    So long as there's enough SSD cache [I've found 200gb+ is fine, 400gb+ is better] you'll have a large enough set of cached data that hits to the disks will generally only happen for data that changes constantly or for sites that are extremely un-busy in that they don't end up staying in cache.

    That said - even on servers with 1~2TB of storage used - the working set of data is considerably smaller.

    I'm personally waiting on enterprise 1TB+ SSDs to become more mainstream/come down in price. The initial cost isn't such a huge deal if you own the gear as it just means a longer ROI but you will, eventually, ROI but there's no way I'm going to pay more for a single drive than I do for the whole rest of the server.

    It's just a matter of time before we reach that point.
    Michael Denney - MDDHosting.com - Proudly hosting more than 37,700 websites since 2007.
    Ultra-Fast Cloud Shared and Pay-By-Use Reseller Hosting Powered by LiteSpeed!
    cPanel • Free SSL • 100% Uptime SLA • 24/7 Support
    Class-leading support that responds in minutes, not days.

  15. #15
    Join Date
    Jan 2004
    Posts
    593
    Depends on what you are hosting and its requirements. Everyone can tell you to go with SSD, but is it necessary?

    Depending on needs, you could go with a basic sata hard drive with plenty of space and use the extra money to throw into ram. Then use varnish, memcache, and any other memory based service to stop the need of access to the disk.

  16. #16
    I run an store with 3000 products - MySQL and PHP - didn't see much difference I must say. I've tried the SSD for a month now, and asked my host to be "downgraded" to normal disk. To me it simply wasn't worth it. Almost similar load times.
    Last edited by bindner; 01-26-2014 at 11:29 PM. Reason: Spellingh error

  17. #17
    Join Date
    Feb 2006
    Location
    Global
    Posts
    1,642
    Quote Originally Posted by bindner View Post
    I run an store with 3000 products - MySQL and PHP - didn't see much difference I must say. I've tried the SSD for a month now, and asked my host to be "downgraded" to normal disk. To me it simply wasn't worth it. Almost similar load times.
    That's extremely surprising, as we've seen noticeable improvements to PHP and MySQL even on much smaller sites, to give the impression it wasn't worth it, I'd wonder about the health of that providers SSD array because to not notice speed improvements in something like MySQL is strange, when it generally massively increases it. Load times aren't a good indication though when judging SSD - a load time will give you little information about MySQL response (unless you're talking about MySQL response times).

    If you're already running most off RAM though, then I imagine it'd be fairly fast anyway.
    Last edited by iexo; 01-26-2014 at 11:36 PM.

  18. #18
    As far as resources on the VPS it was already overkill - plenty of leftover resources, which you (@iexo) say could be the reason that SSD wasn't noticeable? If you can't judge SSD on load times, what are you supposed to judge by?

  19. #19
    Join Date
    Feb 2006
    Location
    Global
    Posts
    1,642
    Quote Originally Posted by bindner View Post
    As far as resources on the VPS it was already overkill - plenty of leftover resources, which you (@iexo) say could be the reason that SSD wasn't noticeable? If you can't judge SSD on load times, what are you supposed to judge by?
    For PHP and MySQL load time won't indicate much at all - because those aspects don't make a big difference to the reported load speed and it's too easily affected by the network. Things like MySQL are measured in response time (for example Google's "loaded 235634 results in 0.00000001 seconds").

    Overall anything designed to test is generally not accurate, because real-world usage is all that matters - I will point out though that by default MySQL is not configured to be quick, so even on SSD a badly configured MySQL setup won't perform well.

    On a default HDD MySQL setup in the past I found it common to submit something, then still have to refresh the page again to see it because the query was in a disk IO queue - over the years I've seen this a hell of a lot, where-as with SSD you'd struggle to hit that same bottleneck.

    I think the main point is, if you don't get noticeable results you probably aren't going to - but the facts show that SSD is faster than HDD for database actions and disk compiling, but if the speed constraints of HDD don't affect you then excellent.

    Edit: As an example, upon clicking submit on here I was waiting 4-5 seconds - if that's down to disk IO then SSD would benefit massively.

    In regards to your resources, if you use RAM caching that will increase your overall speed which could make SSD much less noticeable (same technology).
    Last edited by iexo; 01-27-2014 at 12:38 AM.

  20. #20
    Join Date
    Jan 2014
    Location
    Morrisville, NC
    Posts
    5
    Quote Originally Posted by iexo View Post

    If you're already running most off RAM though, then I imagine it'd be fairly fast anyway.

    Right.
    People should realize when one could benefit from SSD the most.
    The answer is - when you're limited by random IO.

    If your stuff fits in RAM (either database in buffer pool or files in file system cache) then SSD makes less difference.

    Of course, SSD will be better almost in all cases. Just not twice better.

  21. #21
    Join Date
    Mar 2012
    Location
    Dhaka, Bangladesh.
    Posts
    300
    it really worth the price if you are running mysql based sites and want your site load faster.

Similar Threads

  1. Replies: 0
    Last Post: 10-16-2013, 10:48 AM
  2. Replies: 0
    Last Post: 10-07-2013, 11:16 AM
  3. Replies: 4
    Last Post: 07-28-2013, 06:16 PM
  4. Touch Support? Worth the money or 2 expensive?
    By joephill in forum Running a Web Hosting Business
    Replies: 7
    Last Post: 04-17-2005, 05:43 PM

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •